Phil Klay - Redeployment

After that, there’s not much left to do but hit the DFAC. We’re on a FOB, might as well get that good chow while we can. My guys deserve it. Maybe they need it. Besides, everyone says TQ’s got the best chow hall in Anbar, and soon we’ll be back in the COP.

The DFAC’s about a klik away. It’s a huge white barn of a building, two hundred meters long at least, a hundred wide, surrounded by a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire. We show the Ugandan guards our IDs and walk through the gate. Inside, there’s sinks you wash your hands at first, no eating with dirty fingers, and then there’s a huge cafeteria line with KBR workers serving all kinds of shit. I’m not hungry, but I get some prime rib with horseradish sauce.

We sit down at a big table. The DFAC is pretty full, there’s probably a thousand people eating there, and we’re sitting between some Ugandans and some Marines and sailors from the TQ BOS.

I’m across from PFC Dyer, and he’s not eating much. I’m next to some Navy O4 from the BOS, and he’s chowing down. When he sees we aren’t exactly FOBbits, he starts talking. I don’t tell him what we’re here for, I just say a little about our COP and how it’s good to eat something that’s not an MRE or the Iraqis’ red shit and rice. He says, Y’all are lucky. You came here on a good day. It’s Sunday. Sunday is cobbler day. And he points to a serving table in the rear of the DFAC where they’re serving cobbler with ice cream.

So fuck it, when we finish we all get up to get some cobbler, except for Dyer. He says he’s not hungry, but I tell him, “Eric. Get your ass up and get some fucking cobbler.” So we go.

KBR’s laid out all kinds. Cherry cobbler. Apple cobbler. Peach.

The O4 says cherry’s the best. Roger that. I get the cherry. Dyer gets the cherry. We all get the fucking cherry.

Sit back down, I’m across from Dyer and he’s looking at his ice cream melting into the cobbler. No good. I put a spoon in his hand. You’ve got to do the basic things.

In any other vehicle we’d have died.The MRAP jumped, thirty-two thousand pounds of steel lifting and buckling in the air, moving under me as though gravity was shifting. The world pivoted and crashed while the explosion popped my ears and shuddered through my bones.

Gravity settled. There’d been buildings before. Now headlights in the dust. Somewhere beyond, Iraqi civilians startling awake. The triggerman, if there even was one, slipping away. My ears were ringing and my vision was a pinpoint. I crawled my eyes up the length of the barrel of the .50-cal. The end was warped and blasted.

The vehicle commander, Corporal Garza, was yelling at me.

“The fifty’s fucked,” I screamed. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

I got down and climbed through the body of the MRAP. I went on my hands and knees across the seats and opened the back hatch. Then I stepped out.

Timhead and Garza were out already, Timhead posted on the right side of the vehicle while Garza checked the damage. Vehicle Three came up with Harvey in the turret to provide security. It was a tight street, just getting into Fallujah, and they parked off to the left of the MRAP, which was slumped down in the front like a wounded animal.

The mine rollers weren’t even attached anymore. Their wheels were spread out everywhere, surrounded by bits of metal and other debris. One of the vehicle’s tires was sitting a few feet out, cloaked in dust, looking like the big granddaddy of all the little baby mine roller wheels around it.

I wasn’t quite steady on my feet, but training kicked in. I put my rifle in front, scanning the dark, trying to do my fives and twenty-fives, but the dust would have to settle before I could see more than five feet in front of me.

A light in one house glowed through the haze. It flickered, quickly dimming and brightening. My head rang and my back hurt. I must have slammed into the side of the turret.

Timhead and I stood on the right side of the MRAP, oriented outboard. When the dust settled I saw Iraqi faces in a few shitty one-stories, looking out at us. One of them was the bomber, probably, waiting to see if there was gonna be a CASEVAC. They get paid extra for that.

The civilians were probably watching for it, too. You can’t plant a bomb that big without the neighborhood knowing.

Since my heart was pumping fast, the pain throbbed in my back in superquick spurts.

Corporal Garza circled to the other side of the MRAP, assessing the damage. We stayed where we were.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck,” said Timhead.

“You all right?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“I feel fucking…”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

There was a crack of rounds, like someone repeatedly snapping a bullwhip through the air. AK fire, close, and we were exposed. I had no turret to crouch down in, and only my rifle, not the .50. I couldn’t see where the rounds were coming from, but I dropped back behind the side of the MRAP to get cover. I snapped back to training, but there was nothing to see as I scanned over my sights.

Timhead fired from the front of the MRAP. I fired where he was firing, at the side of the building with the flickering light, and I saw my rounds impact in the wall. Timhead stopped. So did I. He was still standing, so I figured he was okay.

A woman screamed. Maybe she’d been screaming the whole time. I stepped out from behind the MRAP and felt my balls tighten up close to my body.

As I approached Timhead, I could see more and more around the wall of the building. Timhead had his rifle at the ready, and that’s where I kept mine. On the other side there was a woman in black, no veil, and maybe a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid lying on the ground and bleeding out.

“Holy shit,” I said. I saw an AK lying in the dust.

Timhead didn’t say anything.

“You got him,” I said.

Timhead said, “No. No, man, no.”

But he did.

We figured that the kidhad grabbed his dad’s AK when he saw us standing there and thought he’d be a hero and take a potshot at the Americans. If he’d succeeded, I guess he’d have been the coolest kid on the block. But apparently he didn’t know how to aim, otherwise me and Timhead would have been fucked. He was firing from under fifty meters, a spray and pray with the bullets mostly going into the air.

Timhead, like the rest of us, had actually been trained to fire a rifle, and he’d been trained on man-shaped targets. Only difference between those and the kid’s silhouette would have been the kid was smaller. Instinct took over. He shot the kid three times before he hit the ground. Can’t miss at that range. The kid’s mother ran out to try to pull her son back into the house. She came just in time to see bits of him blow out of his shoulders.

That was enough for Timhead to take a big step back from reality. He told Garza it wasn’t him, so Garza figured I shot the kid, who everybody was calling “the insurgent” or “the hajji” or “the dumbshit hajji,” as in, “You are one lucky motherfucker, getting fired on by the dumbest dumbshit hajji in the whole fucking country.”

When we finished the convoy, Timhead helped me out of the gunner’s suit. As we peeled it off my body, the smell of the sweat trapped underneath hit us, thick and sour. Normally, he’d make jokes or complain about that, but I guess he wasn’t in the mood. He hardly said anything until we got it off, and then he said, “I shot that kid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You did.”

“Ozzie,” he said, “you think people are gonna ask me about it?”

“Probably,” I said. “You’re the first guy in MP platoon to…” I stumbled. I was gonna say “kill somebody,” but the way Timhead was talking let me know that was wrong. So I said, “To do that. They’ll want to know what it’s like.”